The proposed system for account level unlocks is quite arbitrary. Free HEAT lightning turrets and zephyrs on my other characters sounds great, but getting nothing for faction specific items such as Vulcans or Lashers sounds a bit stingy. What would you say to getting nothing for free, but once you owned an item you could purchase it, or its market-linked equivalent (e.g. MCG, lasher and jackhammer) at 75% off at any time on any other character on your account? So if you're playing your NC character and would like to purchase the GD-7F carbine, the game will let you have it for 25% of its regular price if, say, your VS character owns the VX6-7 already (I believe they are symmetric guns, otherwise pretend they are). I would be much more willing to re-buy equivalents if the purchase felt “oh wow, I'm getting a killer deal here, 75% off!” and would get loads of extra kit for my other characters. Currently I don't because I feel like I've paid good money already, so I just shrug and make do with what I have. I certainly won't buy anything for an alternate character that isn't at least on a 50%-off daily sale, that's for sure. So for the players we would have to re-purchase some stuff you are going to give us for free. This includes all cosmetics that we own as far as I can tell, which is odd really, since to me cosmetics are the items most strongly tied to a specific character. However, we would get to re-purchase them at 25% list price whenever we want (drunk, if my camo purchases are anything to go by) and also get the option to buy faction-specific kit at a discount. I think SOE would make more money overall, and more people would be satisfied this way.
While I'm a proponent of staying faction loyal (and wouldn't ever take advantage of this deal myself), this seems like a good compromise that shouldn't make 4th faction too much more of a power than it is currently.
I'm not so sure. 4th faction is already rampant, 75% off of the rough equivalent of what you're using would make it downright common.
So will the already proposed account level unlock. That enemy sunderer causing you problems? Well sweet, now you can just hop on your 4th faction alts and TK it with the double C4 that you've unlocked on ALL of your LA classes across ALL factions or the tank mines that you have across all engi classes. I'm already seeing plenty of TKing going on as a result of them allowing characters of all factions on a single server, it was a ****** idea from the get-go and will only get worse with account wide unlocks. Doesn't mean I would support the OP's idea either though.
4th faction does involve more people than those who invested SC (who supposedly number 10% of the playerbase). Some of the SC spenders are already part of the 4th faction even without discounts, some will never become a part with or without taking advantage of this. I did a bit of napkin math on the sort of possible population numbers we're talking about in another thread, but I'll do it again even quicker here 10% total SC users 50% of the above would play multiple factions 50% of the above would do it to play the FOTM 33% already were FOTM though 0.1*0.5*0.5*0.66=0.0165... or ~0.8% population movement from two factions to the fotm faction. It's significant, but that's just based on my assumptions. On top of that you have to keep in mind that the common pool items will be shared regardless of this deal, and they may account for some faction jumpers (particularly when it comes to some vehicle weapons.. lightning and liberator). The final discounts would be up to SOE to tune in order to balance the negatives with the increased income (if any!). Kind of a moot point here.. Firstly, because C-4 is not purchasable with SC and secondly: if you're willing to faction hop for a TK, you will have no trouble doing it with the default weaponry of HA, MBT or Lightning.
Good point, I probably should have actually used my brain there and thought of *reasonable* examples. My main point that I was trying to impart was that allowing characters of multiple factions on one server was a complete failure in my opinion. Nothing good has come of it.
Might as well allow it for those who use it without any sneakiness in mind, as any limitations are easily bypassed. This comes standard with a F2P game.
Faction wide unlocks would have probably been a better call. I've got no problem with somebody that just wants to switch servers.
I don't see why this would increase the 4th faction more than already possible really. Since it's a free-to-play game it's already pretty easy to play meta nonsense: the worst being continuous idiotic sundy placement syndrome - there's no way to get GM help in this case. In fact quite the reverse, you may need to swallow a load of grief points to get rid of the stupid sundies.
Sorry: A bump because I'd like to see some more opinions and this forum runs pretty fast. Hmm, it would be nice if you could hold polls on the forums too. So people could give opinions quickly.
